Here is an interesting chess history written in 1918 by the great Edward Lasker. This was included in his seminal work, "Chess and Checkers - The Way to Mastership".

The History of Chess

The game of Chess in the form in which it is played to-day is
usually assumed to be of a much older date than can be proved
with certainty by documents in our possession. The earliest
reference to the game is contained in a Persian romance written
about 600 A.D., which ascribes the origin of Chess to India. Many
of the European Chess terms used in the Middle Ages which can be
traced back to the Indian language also tend to prove that India
is the mother country of the game.

We are, therefore, fairly safe in assuming that Chess is about
1300 years old. Of course we could go farther, considering that
the Indian Chess must have been gradually developed from simpler
board games. Indeed we know from a discovery in an Egyptian tomb
built about 4000 B.C. that board games have been played as early
as 6000 years ago; but we have no way of finding out their rules.

The game of Chess spread from India to Persia, Arabia and the
other Moslem countries, and it was brought to Europe at the time
of the Moorish invasion of Spain. It also reached the far East,
and games similar to Chess still exist in Japan, China, Central
and Northern Asia, the names and rules of which prove that they
descended from the old Indian Chess.

In Europe Chess spread from Spain northward to France, Germany,
England, Scandinavia and Iceland. It became known with
extraordinary rapidity, although at first it was confined to the
upper classes, the courts of the Kings and the nobility. In the
course of time, when the dominance of the nobility declined and
the inhabitants of the cities assumed the leading role in the
life of people, the game of Chess spread to all classes of
society and soon reached a popularity which no other game has
ever equaled.

While in the early Middle Ages the game was played in Europe with
the same rules as in the Orient, some innovations were introduced
by the European players in the later Middle Ages which proved to
be so great an improvement that within a hundred years they were
generally adopted in all countries including the Orient. The
reason for the changes was that in the old form of the game it
took too long to get through the opening period. The new form,
which dates from about 1500 A.D. and the characteristic feature
of which is the enlarged power of Queen and Bishop, is our modern
Chess, the rules of which are uniform throughout the civilized
world.

In the Seventeenth Century Chess flourished mostly in Italy,
which consequently produced the strongest players. Some of them
traveled throughout Europe, challenging the best players of the
other countries and for the most part emerging victorious. At
that time Chess was in high esteem, especially at the courts of
the kings who followed the example of Philip the Second of Spain
in honoring the traveling masters and rewarding them liberally
for their exhibition matches.

Towards the beginning of the Eighteenth Century the game reached
a high stage of development in France, England and Germany. The
most famous master of the time was the Frenchman, Andre Philidor,
who for more than forty years easily maintained his supremacy
over all players with whom he came in contact, and whose fame has
since been equaled only by the American Champion, Paul Morphy,
and by the German, Emanuel Lasker.

During the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries the number of
players who obtained international fame increased rapidly, and in
1851, due to the efforts of the English Champion Staunton, an
international tournament was held in London to determine the
championship of Europe. It was won by the German master
Anderssen, who maintained his leading place for the following
fifteen years, until he was beaten by the youthful Morphy. The
latter, at twenty years of age, was the first American master to
visit Europe and defeated in brilliant style all European masters
whom he met.

Morphy withdrew from the game after his return to America and did
not try to match himself with the Bohemian Steinitz, who in the
meantime had beaten Anderssen, too, and who had come to America.
Steinitz assumed the title of the World's Champion and defended
it successfully against all competitors until 1894, when he was
beaten by Emanuel Lasker, who is still World's Champion, having
never lost a match.

The next aspirant for the World's Championship is the young
Cuban, Jose Raoul Capablanca, who has proved to be superior to
all masters except Lasker. He entered the arena of international
tournaments at the age of twenty-two in San Sebastian, Spain, in
1911, and won the first prize in spite of the competition of
nearly all of Europe's masters. In the last international
tournament, which was held in Petrograd in 1914, he finished
second, Emanuel Lasker winning first prize.

The present ranking of the professional Chess masters is about
the following:

Other players of international fame are the Germans, Tarrasch and
Spielmann, the Austrians, Duras, Marocy and Vidmar, the Russians,
Bernstein and Niemzowitsch, the Frenchman, Janowski and the
Englishman, Burn. Up to the time of the outbreak of the war the
leading Chess Clubs of the different countries arranged, as an
annual feature, national and international tournaments, thus
bringing the Chess players of all nationalities into close
contact.

This internationalism of Chess is of great advantage to the Chess
player who happens to be traveling in a foreign country. There
are innumerable Chess Clubs spread all over the globe and the
knowledge of the game is the only introduction a man needs to be
hospitably received and to form desirable social and business
connections.

It would be going beyond the limit of this summary of the history
of Chess if I tried to give even an outline of the extremely
interesting part Chess has played in French, English and German
literature from the Middle Ages up to the present time. Suffice
it to mention that Chess literature by far exceeds that of all
other games combined. More than five thousand volumes on Chess
have been written, and weekly or monthly magazines solely devoted
to Chess are published in all countries, so that Chess has, so to
speak, become an international, universal language.

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